A memorial that took a different route
James Doohan, the actor who played chief engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott on Star Trek, had hoped to make it into space. Attempts to send some of his ashes on rockets did not leave them in a lasting orbit. The later gesture aboard the International Space Station worked differently: instead of releasing a memorial capsule into space, it carried a tiny keepsake to a place already circling Earth.
A photograph small enough to hide
In 2008, space tourist Richard Garriott carried a laminated photograph bearing some of Doohan’s ashes during his visit to the station. He concealed it beneath a floor panel in Columbus, the European research laboratory attached to the ISS that year. The object was not a public exhibit or an official station memorial; its place there depended on being discreet and small.
That distinction matters. An object sent into orbit must be part of a spacecraft’s planned payload and survive the journey and deployment. A keepsake tucked inside a crewed station avoids the separate challenge of launching and releasing a free-flying capsule—but it also stays out of sight, among the equipment and panels that make the laboratory function.
Scotty aboard the real thing
The gesture linked a fictional engineer, famous for keeping the Enterprise running, with a working space station where real crews conduct research and maintain complex hardware. Doohan’s ashes did not become a visible monument in orbit. Instead, the tribute became a private detail embedded in the station’s history: a small, hidden reminder that the route to space can be as personal—and as improvised—as it is technical.
